Mallorca is the trail of a lost war in France

Not a metaphor. Historical fact, it's just rarely spoken out loud.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Crown of Aragon was not Spanish. She was southern. Mediterranean. Catalonia, Roussillon, Provence, Montpellier, Toulouse – it was one cultural and political world on both sides of the Pyrenees.

Its symbols are still known: the red-gold stripes of Aragon and the Occitan cross - a sign of the south, autonomy and an educated Europe that did not want to live by the rules of Paris.

In 1213, this world was broken. At the Battle of Muir, King Pedro II of Aragon died defending his Occitan allies against the army of northern France. It wasn't just a military defeat - it was the end of the Southern project. After Mure, the Catalans' northward path was closed forever. France took Occitania. Catalonia has no future on land.

The son of the deceased king, Jaime I, was born in Montpellier, France, and grew up with the understanding that the land on which he was born no longer belongs to him. He inherited the crown without direction. And then history took a sharp turn.

If you can’t build an empire on land, you build it on the sea. So Catalonia came to Mallorca.

The conquest of the island in 1229 was not a romantic crusade, but a strategic escape. Compensation for the lost France. Transferring ambition, money and people to the Mediterranean.

So Mallorca got:

• Gothic level of the cathedral capitals of Europe
• status
• Catalan instead of Arabic
• and the role of the Crown of Aragon

The paradox of history is that if the south of France had held out, Mallorca might have become Christian later. Or else. Or not under the Catalan flag.

This island is not the center of a grand plan. He's Plan B. And that's why it turned out like this. When you look at Palma Cathedral, you see not just a temple, but an architectural footprint of the 1213 defeat.

Mallorca is the memory of the empire that did not happen on the mainland, but still took place. Here. On an island.

At least this version is closer to me.